The album was recorded in 1989 as hip hop was entering into its first Golden Age. Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Jarobi White, Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor, and Kamaal “Q-Tip” Fareed had grown up in Queens and Brooklyn, listening to their parents’ jazz records and the sounds of neighborhood DJs from their fire escapes. Their idols were LL CoolJ and Run DMC.

A Tribe Called Quest’s studio partnership with Power continued for three more albums: the landmarkThe Low End Theory, which catapulted the band to legendary status;Midnight Maurauders; andBeats, Rhymes& Life. “He was the fifth member ofA Tribe Called Quest,” Phife Dawg toldWax Poeticsin 2015, in one of his final interviews. “He knew what we wanted before we even told him…it was the easiest part of working on this album.”

Nearly three decades later,People’s Instinctive Travelsstill sounds fresh and relevant—a testament to Tribe’s musicianship and honesty in their rhymes. “I remastered the record for the 25th anniversary release last year, and whenI listened to the songs over and over again,I realized thatI still really love all this stuff; it hasa great life to it,” says Power. “Anybody who makes records knows that that’s kind of an ‘X factor.’ The magic doesn’t always happen; we have enough technique to make it pretty good even if the magic doesn’t happen, but there was certainly magic in those tracks.“